Christian atheism is related to Jesuism, the Christian theological-philosophical movement named for its understanding of Jesus as a great teacher of morals, in direct contrast to traditional Christianity, which claims that Jesus is divine.

According to Paul van Buren, a Death of God theologian, the word God itself is "either meaningless or misleading".[2] He contends that it is impossible to think about God. Van Buren says that

"we cannot identify anything which will count for or against the truth of our statements concerning 'God'".[2]

The inference from these claims to the "either meaningless or misleading" conclusion is implicitly premised on the verificationist theory of meaning. Most Christian atheists believe that God never existed, but there are a few who believe in the death of God literally.[3]Thomas J. J. Altizer is a well-known Christian atheist who is known for his literal approach to the death of God. He often speaks of God's death as a redemptive event. In his book The Gospel of Christian Atheism he speaks of how

"every man today who is open to experience knows that God is absent, but only the Christian knows that God is dead, that the death of God is a final and irrevocable event, and that God's death has actualized in our history a new and liberated humanity".[4]

Theologians including Altizer and Lyas looked at the scientific, empirical culture of today and tried to find religion's place in it. In Altizer's words,

"No longer can faith and the world exist in mutual isolation…the radical Christian condemns all forms of faith that are disengaged with the world."[4]

He goes on to say that our response to atheism should be one of "acceptance and affirmation".[4] Colin Lyas, a Philosophy lecturer at Lancaster University, stated that

"Christian atheists are united also in the belief that any satisfactory answer to these problems must be an answer that will make life tolerable in this world, here and now and which will direct attention to the social and other problems of this life."[3]

"the radical Christian... believes that the ecclesiastical tradition has ceased to be Christian".[4]

He believed that orthodox Christianity no longer had any meaning to people because it did not discuss Christianity within the context of contemporary theology. Christian atheists want to be completely separated from most orthodox Christian beliefs and biblical traditions.[5] Altizer states that a faith will not be completely pure if it is open to modern culture. This faith "can never identify itself with an ecclesiastical tradition or with a given doctrinal or ritual form." He goes on to say that faith cannot "have any final assurance as to what it means to be a Christian".[4] Altizer said, "We must not, he says, seek for the sacred by saying 'no' to the radical profanity of our age, but by saying 'yes' to it".[5] They see religions which withdraw from the world as moving away from truth. This is part of the reason why they see the existence of God as counter-progressive. Altizer wrote of God as the enemy to man because mankind could never reach its fullest potential while God existed.[4] He went on to state that "to cling to the Christian God in our time is to evade the human situation of our century and to renounce the inevitable suffering which is its lot".[4]

Jesus, although not seen as divine, is still a central feature of Christian atheism. Most Christian atheists think of Jesus as a wise and good man, accepting his moral teachings but rejecting the idea of his divinity. Hamilton said that to the Christian atheist, Jesus is not really the foundation of faith; instead he is a "place to be, a standpoint".[5] Christian atheists look to Jesus as an example of what a Christian should be, but they do not see him as God.

Hamilton wrote that following Jesus means being "alongside the neighbor, being for him",[5] and that to follow Jesus means to be human, to help other humans, and to further humankind.

Catholic atheism is a belief in which the culture, traditions, rituals, and norms of Catholicism are accepted, but the existence of God is rejected. It is illustrated in Miguel de Unamuno's novel San Manuel Bueno, Mártir (1930). According to research in 2007, only 27% of Catholics in the Netherlands considered themselves theist, while 55% were ietsist or nontheist, and 17% were agnostic. Many Dutch people still affiliate with the term "Catholic", and use it within certain traditions as a basis of their cultural identity, rather than as a religious identity. The vast majority of the Catholic population in the Netherlands is now largely irreligious in practice.[6]

"I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: 'I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept his claim to be God.' That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. ... Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God."

Lewis's argument, now known as Lewis's Trilemma, has been criticized for, among other things, constituting a false trilemma. As philosopher John Beversluis argues, Lewis "deprives his readers of numerous alternate interpretations of Jesus that carry with them no such odious implications."[8]